Libros
Mother Jones
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Spring is upon us, which means the weather is finally nice enough to sit outside and munch on a grilled burger slathered with ketchup. Or, if you prefer, a crispy salad topped with strawberries and walnuts. Either way, chances are that at least a few of the ingredients in your meal were grown in California—the country’s cornucopia. The Golden State cultivates more than a third of all vegetables and two-thirds of all fruits and nuts sold domestically. California is also home to the largest number of farmers markets and, according to the most recent USDA Organic Survey, the highest number of 100 percent organic farms of any state.
But many of the people growing and picking this food would view a fresh spring picnic as a rare luxury. A high percentage of farmworkers in California’s agricultural counties struggle with hunger and diet-related health problems, according to a new report by the policy research group California Institute for Rural Studies. Nearly half of the workers interviewed in Yolo County, just east of the state’s capital, have trouble putting dinner on the table, a rate nearly three times higher than national and state averages.
“Ironically, the same agricultural workers who are responsible for producing an abundance of food find themselves at serious risk of hunger, diet-related chronic diseases, unsafe living and working conditions, and inadequate access to health care,” the report states.
Yolo County is just east of Sacramento and encompasses the headquarters of the Mariani Nut Company, one of the biggest privately-held walnut and almond producers in the world, and Rominger Brothers Farms, subject of this profile by former New York Times columnist Mark Bittman. Yolo is the state’s largest producer of safflower, used to make vegetable oil, and the state’s the third largest producer of grain.
The area is best known for its tomatoes. A whopping 96 percent of the United States’ processing tomatoes—which are used in pizza sauce, ketchup and soup—are grown in California, and Yolo is the second largest producer in the state. When asked what they would buy if money was no object, the workers surveyed listed tomatoes over any other fruit or vegetable. Yet, as the CIRS report notes, though tomatoes are a staple for many of the Latino farm workers employed there, those very same workers cannot always afford to buy them locally.
Almost one third of the farmworkers CIRS interviewed said they didn’t have enough food to eat a balanced and nutritious diet regularly, and 15 percent had to eat less or stop eating because there wasn’t enough money for food. Two previous surveys by the California Institute for Rural Studies have also shown that workers in Fresno County and Salinas, which are located south of Yolo, also face high rates of hunger. Fresno is known for its almonds and grapes, while the coastal region of Salinas much of the nation’s lettuce and strawberries.
Part of the reason farmworkers have trouble accessing nutritious food in these agricultural areas may have to do with geography. Rural Yolo County qualifies as a food desert, with vast stretches lacking any supermarkets. Yolo County Food Bank serves about 47,000 people per month and over a quarter of its stock is fresh produce, but there are still stretches in the county’s rural northwest where 40 percent of the farmworkers surveyed live that the food bank doesn’t serve, because the program tends to focus on more urban areas.
Access to healthy food is also deeply tied to low earnings and the undocumented status of many farmers. Farm workers nationwide make an average salary of just $13,000. And about half of California’s farmworkers are undocumented. Many don’t apply for food assistance programs, the study found, because they are afraid of getting detained or deported.
While California farm workers struggle to fill their pantries, their employers are busy stocking kitchens across the globe. California grows over 400 different types of foods, from berries and celery to milk and almonds, and exports them to many different countries, including the European Union, Canada, China, India, and Turkey. According to the latest US Department of Agriculture figures, in 2014, nearly 16 percent of total US agricultural exports abroad originated in California, the highest of any state. (Iowa came in second at just 7.5 percent.)
Given the success of the agricultural industry in California, says Gail Wadsworth, co-executive director of CIRS and one of the authors of the report, there’s no reason why farm workers should get the short end of the stick. CIRS has advised the Yolo Food Bank to encourage more farms to contribute fresh food to the food bank or directly to their workers. Says Wadsworth: “I don’t see any rational reason why farm workers, who are essential to every American’s well-being, should be so poorly paid.”
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Why the People Picking California’s Tomatoes Can’t Afford to Eat Them
Mother Jones
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After finally telling us that he didn’t need a foreign policy team because he was his own team, Donald Trump made yet another U-turn today and announced his foreign policy team. It’s enough to make you dizzy. I’ll let Robert Costa introduce them:
Keith Kellogg…executive vice president at CACI International, a Virginia-based intelligence and information technology consulting firm…. Joseph Schmitz….Blackwater Worldwide…. George Papadopoulos…international energy center at the London Center of International Law Practice…. Walid Phares…National Defense University and Daniel Morgan Academy in Washington…. Carter Page…managing partner of Global Energy Capital and longtime energy industry executive.
This is quite a team. Kellogg was COO of the Coalition Provisional Authority in 2003-04 under Paul Bremer, and we all know how that turned out. Schmitz is the son of noted Southern California crackpot John Schmitz—which I suppose I can’t hold against him—and served as inspector general of the Defense Department under George Bush. He resigned in 2005 following charges that he “slowed or blocked investigations of senior Bush administration officials, spent taxpayer money on pet projects and accepted gifts that may have violated ethics guidelines.”
Papadopoulos is on his second presidential campaign this year, having previously found a home with Ben Carson. Phares is well known to all Fox News viewers for his regular appearances there—and for his background during the 80s as a “high ranking political official in a sectarian religious militia responsible for massacres during Lebanon’s brutal, 15-year civil war.”
Page I don’t know much about. Apparently he’s the head of an investment fund “focused on energy investments worldwide,” and that’s good enough for Trump.
So….this is a helluva C-list crew Trump has assembled. A guy who worked for Paul Bremer; the son of John Schmitz; a former Ben Carson advisor; a Fox News talking head; and a guy who specializes in torts.
As for Trump’s actual foreign policy, apparently it’s the same as always: he’s super militaristic, but he doesn’t want to actually use the American military for much of anything. He’d like other countries to start taking care of Ukraine and NATO and the South China Sea—or, if they insist on America doing it, he’d like them to pay us for it. Apparently Trump’s ambition is to sit at the head of a vast American tribute empire.
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Oh Wait—Donald Trump Decides He Has a Foreign Policy Team After All
Mother Jones
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Hillary Clinton’s attack on Bernie Sanders over health care policy isn’t done yet. On Wednesday afternoon, her campaign convened a press call to slam her Democratic primary opponent for his single-payer, Medicare-for-all health care plan.
Clinton campaign officials alleged that Sanders is not releasing the details of how he’d pay for the plan because he wants to hide tax increases that would hit the middle class. Earlier on Wednesday, Sanders’ campaign had released a comprehensive list of proposals to pay for his various campaign schemes—except for health care. As recently as 2013, Sanders had regularly introduced bills for single-payer health plans that include details on the tax increases that he would include to pay for the system, including an across-the-board 2.2 percent income tax hike. Since launching his presidential campaign, he’s continually promised to introduce a new Medicare-for-all proposal, but has yet to come out with the details.
Speaking on behalf of the Clinton campaign, senior policy advisor Jake Sullivan and national press secretary Brian Fallon ripped into Sanders for the delay, claiming that it did a disservice to Democratic voters, with the Iowa caucuses just three weeks away. “It’s not becoming, and it’s not worthy of the caucus-goers in Iowa,” Fallon said.
The pair of Clinton aides weren’t subtle in suggesting that the reason Sanders has yet to unveil a proposal is because he doesn’t want to talk about the tax increases needed to fund it. “One can only draw the conclusion that the Sanders campaign does not want to outline what is going to amount to a massive across-the-board tax hike on working families,” Sullivan said. (The Sanders campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
Clinton has regularly attacked both Sanders and her other Democratic opponent, former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, for being willing to raise taxes on people she terms middle class—a broad definition that reaches nearly to the top tier of incomes.
Although they objected to the lack of detail, the Clinton campaign staffers evidently had enough details to launch a harsh critique of Sanders’ concept of universal health care. “Clinton believes, given the problems of income inequality, the last thing that we should be doing is raising taxes on the middle class,” Sullivan said. “She has said many times that we need to give middle-class families a raise, not a tax increase.”
What about the contention from Sanders that any extra costs from taxes would be offset with boosts in disposable income once people no longer need to pay for insurance? “From our perspective, it is far from clear that everyone would in fact save money from Sen. Sanders’ plan,” Sullivan said. “In fact, we believe that many middle-class and working families would be worse off under this plan.”
The Clinton campaign has dug in deep against Sanders on health care this week. Clinton attacked her opponent’s plan as a “risky deal” during an Iowa event on Monday, and her daughter Chelsea Clinton, acting as a campaign surrogate, said on Tuesday that it’d “strip millions and millions and millions of people off their health insurance.” Although single-payer health care might be a political longshot after the drawn-out fight over the more moderate Obamacare, attacking the merits of single-payer in a Democratic primary is a strange strategic choice for the Clinton campaign. A poll from a progressive group last year found that about 80 percent of Democrats support single-payer.
But Clinton seems intent on doubling down on the sort of arguments you typically hear from Republicans, claiming that her opponent is too focused on taking money away from voters for big government programs. “When Hillary Clinton says that, as president, her number one challenge would be to seek to get incomes rising again,” Fallon said, “a proof point of that is that she does not want to start off on day one by slapping a tax increase that would directly take money out of the pockets of those very same households whose take-home pay we’re seeking to increase. So it’s a very risky proposition, altogether, for Sen. Sanders to be suggesting that he wants to address those stagnant wages as well, but all he can commit to, what he is promising off the bat, is tax increases that would adversely impact the take-home pay for those very same households.”
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Clinton Campaign Ramps Up Attacks on Sanders’ Health Care Plan
